I moved on from most of my father’s automotive prejudices. He refused to buy from the Japanese ‘who treated our prisoners so cruelly’, French and Italian cars would ‘always let you down in the end’ and Fords were gaudy creations of ‘big-headed Americans’.

The sheer awfulness of CPAC GB

Lord Hermer is an unserious man

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Instead, it was Volkswagen (VW) I never trusted. Stupidly stuck in a bygone era, I couldn’t get over that infamous 1938 photograph of Adolf Hitler, smiling with childlike delight, leaning over a miniature Beetle. Beside him, in a smart civvy suit, SS Colonel Ferdinand Porsche gleefully shows off the prototype. The foundation of Volkswagen is the definitive portrait of a dictator and his sycophants.

Okay, it’s 88 years later and I don’t like hearing about people losing jobs, even at VW. But I do detect a whiff of karma this week. One of the world’s largest automotive empires is in such trouble it plans to axe half its vehicle line-up and sack up to 100,000 workers globally. It’s not restructuring – it’s capitulation.

The Nazis never got round to building their ‘people’s car’; the second world war started and they used the expensively assembled VW hierarchy and factory to make V-1 flying bombs to terrorise Britain instead. VW engineers personally selected skilled Jewish metalworkers from Auschwitz and, by 1944, its production lines were manned by Soviet prisoners, political dissidents and Jewish........

© The Spectator